The Making of a Prig Part 11

"I have just looked through the books," he said, "and don't see anything good enough for you. Would you care to take anything else?"

"I don't quite know what else I could do," said Katharine doubtfully.

She wanted to get away, and did not exactly know how to make a dignified exit.

"Book-keeping, for instance, or literary work? Have you ever tried being a secretary? Ah, I am sure you have! You are not the sort of young lady to lead the life of a humdrum governess, eh?"

"I was my father's secretary," said Katharine. Mr. Parker was leaning across the table and playing with the pens in the ink-stand, so that his hand almost touched her elbow.

"Of course you were. So I was right about you, wasn't I? Don't you think that was very clever of me, now?"

He leaned a little nearer to her, and Katharine drew back instinctively and took her elbow off the table. He found the straight look of her eyes a little disconcerting, and left off playing with the penholders.

"Speaking seriously," he said, donning an official air with alacrity, "would you care to take a post as secretary?"

He had dropped his eyegla.s.s and his supercilious manner, and Katharine took courage.

"I should, immensely. But they are so hard to get."

"Of course they are not easy to pick up, but in an agency like ours we often hear of something good. Let me see, would you like to go out to South Africa? Hardly, I should think."

Katharine said she would not like to go out to South Africa; whereupon Mr. Parker offered New Zealand as an alternative.

"Your connection seems to lie princ.i.p.ally in other quarters of the globe," Katharine felt obliged to remark; and in an unguarded moment she began to laugh at the absurdity of his suggestions. Mr. Parker at once ceased to look official, and laughed with her, and began playing with the pens in the inkstand again.

"Ah, now we understand each other better," he said, resuming his familiar tone. "What you want is a snug little berth with some literary boss, who won't give you too much to do, eh? A nice salary, and some one charming to play with; isn't that it?"

The sheer vulgarity of the man exposed the real nature of the situation to her. Her first impulse was to rush out of his sight, at any cost; but she restrained herself with an effort, and drew a sharp breath to gain time to collect her resources.

"I am afraid, Mr. Parker, that we don't understand each other at all,"

she said very slowly, trying to conceal the tremble in her voice; "and as I don't feel inclined to emigrate, I think I had better--"

"Now, now, what a hurry you are in, to be sure!" interrupted Mr.

Parker, getting up and lounging round to her side of the table. "You haven't even heard what I was going to say. I've been looking out for a secretary myself, for some time, 'pon my oath I have; but never, until this blessed moment, have I set eyes upon a young lady who suited me so well as you. Now, what do you say to that, eh?"

Katharine had risen, too, and was turning imperceptibly towards the door. She glanced contemptuously round the room, that was so entirely devoid of the ordinary apparatus of business, and she walked swiftly to the door and opened it, before he had time to prevent her.

"You are most kind," she said sarcastically, emboldened by the presence of the office boy, "but I feel that the work would be very much too hard for me. A large business like yours must need so much looking after! Good morning."

Outside, while she was waiting for the lift, her composure completely deserted her, and she found she was trembling all over, and had to lean against the bal.u.s.ters for support.

"I knowed you wasn't the sort to go a-mixing of yourself up with that kidney," observed the porter, who detected the tears in her eyes.

"Why didn't you tell me he was such a horrid man?" asked Katharine.

She was thoroughly unnerved, and even the porter's sympathy was better than none at all.

"It wasn't my business to hinterfere," said the porter, who was merely curious and not sympathetic at all; and Katharine dried her eyes hastily, and tried to laugh.

"Of course it is n.o.body's business," she said drearily, and gave him twopence for helping her to realise the fact. "And I shouldn't have cried at all, if I had had any lunch," she added vehemently to herself.

Some one was waiting to enter the lift as she stepped out of it. She looked up by chance and caught his eye, and they uttered each other's name in the same breath.

For a moment they stood silent, as they loosed hands again. Katharine had blushed, hopelessly and irretrievably; but he was standing a little away from her, with just the necessary amount of interest in his look, and the necessary amount of pleasure in his smile. Paul was a man who prided himself on never straining a situation; and directly he saw her agitation at meeting him, he a.s.sumed the conventional att.i.tude, entirely for purposes of convenience.

"This is very delightful. Are you staying in town?"

"Yes. At least--"

"Your father well, I hope? And Miss Esther? I am charmed to hear it.

Supposing we move out of the draught; yes, cold, isn't it? Thanks, I won't go up now--" this to the porter, who was still waiting by the lift. "Which way are you going? Good! I have a call to pay in Gloucester Place, and we might go in the same cab."

It was pleasant to be ordered about, after taking care of herself for seven weeks, and Katharine yielded at once to the masterful tone, which had always compelled her compliance from the moment she had first heard it.

"Now, please, I want to hear all about it," he began briskly, as they drove westwards. His manner was no longer conventional, and his familiar voice carried her back over the weary months of last year to the spring when she had still been a child. Somehow she did not feel, as with Ted, that she could not tell him about her failures: it seemed as though this man must know all there was to know about her, whether it was pleasant for him to hear it or not; though, as she told him about her coming to town and her subsequent career there, she made her tale so entertaining that Paul was something more than idly amused, when she finally brought it to an end.

"Do you think I ought not to have done it?" she asked him, anxiously, as he did not speak. He looked at her before he answered.

"I cannot imagine how they let you do it!"

"Oh, don't! That is what that horrid old lady princ.i.p.al said. What could possibly happen to me, I should like to know?"

He looked at her again, with his provoking serenity.

"Oh, nothing, of course! At least, not to you."

"Why not to me, particularly?" she asked half petulantly. She did not know whether to be pleased or annoyed that he should credit her with the same infallible quality as every one else.

"Because things of that nature do not, I believe, happen to girls of your nature. But of course I may be wrong; I am quite ignorant in these matters."

She smiled at his show of humility; it was so characteristic of him to affect indifference about his own opinions. But she had learnt something already that day, and she remembered Mr. Parker, and thought that Paul very possibly was wrong on this occasion.

"Every one tells me that. I can't see how I am different," she said thoughtfully.

"I shouldn't worry about it, if I were you. You could not be expected to see. But it is just that little difference that has probably carried you through."

Katharine remembered Mr. Parker again, and laughed outright.

"I don't think so," she said. "I think it is more likely to have been my sense of humour."

"You used to laugh like that when I first knew you," he said involuntarily. She knew that he had spoken without reflection, and she laughed again with pleasure. It was always a triumph to surprise him into spontaneity.

"How jolly it was in those days! Do you remember our tea in the orchard, how we watched Aunt Esther out of the front door, and then brought the things out through the back door?"

"Yes; and how you spilt the milk, and cook wouldn't let you have any more, and our second cups were spoilt?"

"Rather! And how you shocked Dorcas--"

"Ah," sighed Paul; "we can never do those delightful things again. We know one another too well, now."

They allowed themselves to become almost depressed, for the s.p.a.ce of a moment, because they knew one another so well. "All the same,"